September’s masthead is up! and comes from a quote from the Muse, where she called me the Gender Buddha because of how some of my philosophies match up with a quote from Sharon Salzberg: “The Buddha’s enlightenment solved the Buddha’s problem. Now you solve yours.”

What I mean by this quote is that my butchness is my unique solution to what I see as a gender problem in the culture and society in which I live. I feel like I ran around wildly, trying on different genders, until I finally landed inside of butch … and it just so clearly makes so much sense to me, it resonates with my sense of self and with my sense of how gender works in the world, my deeper philosophies about the value of the body.

It acknowledges that my solutions might not be your solutions – that your ‘gender problem’ might have a completely different landscape or solution than mine does. In fact, it should have a different landscape, a different path, even if it does arrive at similar solutions, because we are two different people with different life experiences, different family backgrounds, different habits and thoughts.

I do hope that some of my gender ramblings are useful to you on your own paths, but I always want to recognize that your path might be very different than mine. Then again, we might be walking along hand-in-hand … and that sure is nice too. It’s great to have company, it makes this journey so much less lonely. Thanks for coming along in the adventures, wherever you’re at.

PS – Did you know you can find an archive of past mastheads on the about page? It’s true!

[It's from when I went camping on the Delaware river last weekend – I asked the friends I was camping with to take the shot. I loved going down to the river in the mornings and meditating on that rock. Love how the shot turned out! – ss]

Nicely put. I particularly appreciate your definition of a "gender problem" as social rather than not only or primarily individual. It reminds me of something Riki Wilchins says in her book Read My Lips:

"It's not so much that there have always been transgendered people; it's that there have always been cultures which imposed regimes of gender. It is only within a system of gender oppression that transgender exists in the first place."

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